Hasta La Gadget!

It’s certainly not due to low demand that Best Buy has suddenly cut off bits of the price for several Apple MacBook products here in the summer of 2012. The first of these discounts is from the massively powerful MacBook Pro with Retina display, tricked out with 8GB of memory and a 512GB solid-state drive – where normally it’d be $2,799.99, it’s now been cut to $2,659.99, that being a $140 USD discount. But why is it such a big deal that Apple products are discounted when essentially every other manufacturer discounts products such as these all the time?

The name of the game is control. Apple controls their prices – or at least makes an impression on businesses that are allowed to carry their products that they’d like their prices to remain steady. Another example of a discount here at Best Buy is the least expensive Retina MacBook Pro available being cut by $110 to come out to $2,089.99. Best Buy is a store known for their frequent price changing, and this discount could very well have been agreed upon with Apple for a very short time, so if you’re the type to fuss over a $100 discount off of a $2,000 computer, you’d best head out today.

Each of the discounts are available for in-store pickup only, and also include a MacBook Air, normally costing $999.99 and running for $949.99 right now. These notebooks have been reviewed in full by SlashGear in kind here: [MacBook Pro with Retina Display (mid-2012) Review] and [MacBook Air 13-inch (mid-2012) Review] and are both of them beasts to be reckoned with. Have a peek at our Best Buy timeline below to catch up on the dealings in the store of the hour.

[via CNET]

MacBook Pro 2012 family gets price slash at Best Buy is written by Chris Burns & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.

Google has admitted that its Chrome browser is the cause of MacBook stability problems, with an incompatibility between the app and the integrated Intel graphics leading to crashes. “Work is proceeding to find and fix the root cause” a Google spokesperson told Gizmodo, though the company does splash a little of the blame onto Apple itself and the way OS X Lion is handling kernel issues.

“Radar bug number 11762608 has been filed with Apple regarding the kernel panics,” the Google spokesperson continued, “since it should not be possible for an application to trigger such behavior.” Apple is yet to comment on the issue.

Google is taking a two-pronged approach to dealing with the glitch. Chrome users should have already received a patch on Thursday afternoon, that temporarily shuts off some of the browser’s use of GPU acceleration on machines with the Intel HD 4000 graphics.

Meanwhile, work is underway to come up with a more lasting fix with full GPU acceleration functionality still in place. There’s no timescale for its release, however.

Yesterday, at its second Google IO keynote, Google confirmed that Chrome now has 310m users worldwide, making it the most popular browser around according to all the metrics the search giant said it could find.

Google Statement:

“We have identified a leak of graphics resources in the Chrome browser related to the drawing of plugins on Mac OS X. Work is proceeding to find and fix the root cause of the leak.

The resource leak is causing a kernel panic on Mac hardware containing the Intel HD 4000 graphics chip (e.g. the new Macbook Airs). Radar bug number 11762608 has been filed with Apple regarding the kernel panics, since it should not be possible for an application to trigger such behavior.

While the root cause of the leak is being fixed, we are temporarily disabling some of Chrome’s GPU acceleration features on the affected hardware via an auto-updated release that went out this afternoon (Thursday June 28). We anticipate further fixes in the coming days which will re-enable many or all of these features on this hardware.”

Google admits MacBook Chrome crash bug is written by Chris Davies & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.

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